Chapter Twenty-Seven
W HEN MY DAD ROLLS UP to the airport, I’m a shell of my former self. It’s the situation with Will, and it’s the stubborn dehydration of someone who refuses to drink water on a plane lest she have to ask the person in the aisle seat to get up for her to pee.
“Yikes,” Dad says, opening the trunk for me to throw in my suitcase. “What’s with the face?”
“I’m just dehydrated. It’s good to see you too, Dad.”
He gives me a big hug and closes the passenger-side door for me once I’ve jumped in. Then he hands me his water bottle.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I told him the gist on the phone—I ruined things with Will, blah, blah, blah—and he dutifully asked the key questions: why, when, who. I gave the bare minimum reply to each.
“There’s nothing to say.” I look at my reflection in the window, my greasy bangs stuck to my face. “Sometimes relationships just aren’t meant for the long term.”
Dad guffaws. “You’re twenty-seven and have had, what, one boyfriend in your life? Honey, you’re too young to sound so jaded.”
“Well, Mom’s not picking me up with you, so.”
I watch his expression morph into something much flatter. We don’t talk again until he merges onto I-480.
When we arrive home, I half expect to hear my mom’s clunky steps to the door to greet me. But I don’t. It’s completely silent.
I throw my suitcase in my childhood bedroom, then Dad and I sit on the couch, having pizza for dinner. Mom never let us eat on the couch; we always had to use the dining table. But my dad’s free now to live however he wants.
“Are you happy?” I ask him once the pizza cools to cold and a commercial interrupts our home improvement show.
“I’m actually feeling okay.” Nothing in his tone contradicts him.
It’s hard to understand, then, why that feels so much worse.
“Bitch, this is unhealthy.”
Gen’s not wrong. But if listening to weepy pop songs on repeat for two days is unhealthy, just let me die, then. I’m not interested in health.
Gen is here because my dad let her in. Ever since I told her what happened with Will, she’s been texting nonstop; the second I set foot in Ohio again, she announced she was coming immediately, as in flying from Boston. I said don’t bother, that’s ridiculous, don’t waste your money, I want to sleep it off. Gen said, Nah .
Now she’s here in my neon-pink room, which is stuffed to the brim with the vestiges of my youth. Dog-eared coming-of-age novels and old SAT scores stuffed in my desk. Every textbook from college. Every spare sheet of paper I touched in elementary school, including complex social charts we made at sleepovers, naming our crushes, allies, frenemies.
Gen paces, cleaning. I’m in bed on my side, wearing a sorority-date-party tank top and flannel reindeer pajama pants, scrolling aimlessly on Instagram and watching videos of people tempering chocolate.
“I don’t understand how it ended,” she says.
“It was never going to work.”
“I’m not sure why you say that like it’s a fact. You had one fight. Big whoop. That’s everyone’s marriages ever.” Gen plumps the other pillow and climbs into bed with me.
I shake my head and prop my elbows up on the mattress. “Some of those marriages end. So maybe it’s better to call it before kids get involved.”
“Babe, there’s a difference between a pattern of marriage-ending communication breakdowns and one dramatic fight based on insecurities on both sides.”
“But it wasn’t just the fight. From the very beginning, he’s been wishy-washy.”
“Well, maybe because you’ve been wishy-washy, too.”
I glare at her. “Out of self-preservation.”
“Who’s to say he wasn’t doing the same thing? You think he’s so fucking different from you and that it’s just your mom and your dad all over again, but from where I’m standing, you two idiots are exactly the same in some key ways.”
“And what ways are those?” I sink my head back, deeper into the bed.
“You’re both terrified to give in to this because you both ultimately think you’re not good enough for the other,” Gen huffs. “You think he’s going to reject you the way your parents rejected each other, and he thinks, Well, my own father whom I looked up to barely thought I was good at anything; this perfect girl won’t, either . Freud was right, I don’t care what anyone says. It all goes back to the parents.”
“He does not think I’m too good for him. Look at him and look at me.”
Gen rolls her eyes so hard I worry they’ll get stuck that way. Then she scoots closer so she’s right in front of me on the bed, her hands on my crossed legs.
“Leigh, stop it. It’s not that he’s a lit bro and you have nothing in common. It’s that he rejected you once and you can’t handle it. You’d rather be the rejecter. You’d rather quit your job before you get fired and you’d rather preemptively decide all your classmates are judgmental than risk them judging you.”
“At least I’m doing what I love and not wasting away in corporate America. At least I didn’t sell out.”
I hate myself the second the words leave my mouth.
Gen shakes her head and snorts. “A more insecure person would turn this into a giant fight that would take at least seven business days to recover from, but because I am, like, so mature, I’m going to let you get away with that, because I know you’re hurting and confused and just being mean out of a desire for catharsis.”
“Gen, I’m so sorry. You’re right. I’m being a bitch.”
Gen nods as if to say Indeed! It’s the benefit of being friends with someone for so long. They know your triggers and you know theirs, and you can give them the benefit of the doubt. Will and I haven’t had the chance to build that sort of trust.
“But to set the record straight, I loved creative writing in school and hey, that’s why I read now. That’s why I write fan fiction. To do what you guys do in your MFA sounds exhausting to me. If that’s selling out, whatever. If writing poetry is what makes you happy, fabulous; do it. But there are ways to live a meaningful creative life without being a full-time writer.”
I think of Gen at work, complaining about her colleagues. Complaining about corporate life. But it’s never been more than your standard anti-capitalist annoyance. She’s not shackled to her company. She doesn’t feel tamped down the way I did at Coleman + Derry.
I place my hands on top of hers. “No, of course. I know. I definitely don’t think the only way to live a creative life is to get paid to write poetry. I just want to write for myself so badly, my body aches for it.”
Gen nods, satisfied. “We can get back to our regularly scheduled wallow programming now. I just wanted to clarify that.”
I sink down into my pillows. “How am I supposed to go back to fucking poetry workshop and act like everything is normal when it most certainly is not ?”
“Well, this is why they tell you not to commit incest, must I remind you.”
“Yeah, you’re right, post-breakup awkwardness is the number one reason against incest.”
She flicks me with her finger. “Do you want to make an action plan? If you want him back, I think it’s on you to make this right.”
I close my eyes, the arguments for and against tumbling alongside each other in my brain. I’m not ready to consider any of them. The shell I’ve created has cracked open, and I just want to let it seethe for a bit. There’s, somehow, a freedom in that.
“I have no idea what I want right now.”
She grabs my hand, holds it tightly. “That’s okay, too.”
“This is a really terrible bread knife,” my mom mutters in the kitchen of her condo. “I think I accidentally let your father keep the good one.”
As with all school breaks, I do them in two parts. Four days with Dad, three days with Mom. I got here two days ago, and we’ve tiptoed around each other like the Big Breakdown didn’t happen at all. We’re supposed to have one final meal together before she takes me to the airport early tomorrow morning, but I’m on edge. Too much unsatisfying small talk, and suddenly I have the urge to just speak plainly.
“I broke up with Will last week,” I blurt out before I lose the nerve.
She takes a second to look up from cutting the baguette. “I’m sorry to hear that, honey.”
She resumes cutting. I stare at her and all the wrinkles that make up her face, noticing how my early wrinkles are developing in a similar pattern.
“Do you… do you want to talk about it?”
It’s an olive branch, but I’m not sure I’m ready to take it. “No. I just figured you should know.”
She nods, then begins putting bread in a basket next to the cheese board she’s also assembling.
“You’re never getting back together with Dad, are you?”
She looks up at me with the saddest look. “No.”
“But why?”
“Honey, I’ve told you why.” She stares into her glass of water. “I don’t want to come home every night to conflict. My job is emotionally exhausting. Your father and I want different things in life, and that fact managed to squeeze us into a lot of arguments.”
“Are you emotionally exhausted by me?” I ask, and the words shock me, that I actually permitted them to come into existence.
She looks as if I’ve hit her.
“What do you have to do with any of this? I’m talking about Dad.”
“I don’t think it’s some huge leap to think that if he was too much for you, then I am, too.”
“Stop it.” I watch her force her face into submission. Slowly, she says, “Honey, just because Dad has been a good father to you doesn’t mean he’s been a good husband to me. Both of those facts can exist simultaneously. I don’t want to be in a relationship with him anymore. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love him or that your childhood was a fraud. But you need to let me be done with him. Neither of our experiences invalidates the other’s.”
“I understand that, Mom,” I huff. “I’m an adult.” Though there’s a small seed in me that wonders if I’m not being very adult about their divorce at all.
“I never claimed to be perfect.” Her voice is tight, like she’s about to cry. It’s a subtle cue to my brain, a whispered taunt: Feel guilty. You did this to her.
“I’m sorry,” I grit out.
She bites her lip and doesn’t respond. I follow her into the living room, where we eat and watch TV in silence. I wait to hear my dad’s breathless laughter from the place beside me, the other piece of bread in a Leigh sandwich. But it never comes.